The candidate-horses for 1988 have not even been corralled, let alone been shown the starting gate. Senator Kennedy's campaigning potential remains doubtful, especially after the failure of his 1980 run against President Carter. The Kennedy name, if it represents any assemblage of political ideas at all, stands for liberalism - an anachronistic preference for the operations of big, federal government whether in protecting trade or in second-guessing business decisions on the location of industry.

One school of pundits argues that if, in the next two years, the American economy goes into recession and unemployment rises, the voters would turn again to an old-style liberal Democrat of Senator Kennedy's stamp. Even if there were something in this, it is hard to see Californians. Texans, the states of the South, the Sun-Belt and the WEst seeking their future prosperity under the leadership of an Irish politician from Massachusetts, however famous his name.

Senator Kennedy's doings, his loves, his life, even his weight excite attention because of his kin and his membership of a mythic dynasty; the Kennedy name was long ago carried into the realm of celebrity in which cold judgements of significance no longer apply. But the Kennedy fame came also to rest on the disappointment of many Americans, of all conditions and all levels of sophistication, about their political leaders, especially their presidents. Interest in the Kennedys, even in its very prurience, often came from a thirst for high-toned, visionary leadership.

It is no small part of Mr Reagan's achievement that he has exorcised the Kennedys as a symbolic element in American political life. He, a politician from a vastly different background, has supplied that quality of leadership which many Americans, rightly or wrongly, thought was lost with the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.

Senator Kennedy's presence on the presidential hustings was always more potent as a symbol of leadership than as an exhibition of his own, rather pedestrian qualities. But in the age of Mr Reagan such symbolism has lost its force. The Kennedy name has shrunk. The 1988 presidential race will be richer for the absence of its bearer.